****UPDATE***** - AFP PHOTO OF SAME BURNING DUMP SAYS: "Black smoke engulfs the sky following an Israeli air raid on Beirut's Kafarchima neighborhood." So Reuters calls it a downed Israeli Jet, AFP calls it the results of an Isreali air raid, and again we call it... a trash dump. SCROLL FOR DETAILS AND PHOTO

I can't tell you enough times DON'T TRUST ANYTHING YOU SEE IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA! And I can't ask the media enough times, where the hell are all the editors!? How is it all you high paid jackasses manage to let all of these just slip past your high standard scrutinizing policies. I can only pray that Fox News picks up on the story (beyond the original photoshopped images) and exposes what a widespread scandal this is to an audience beyond the blogosphere. Any Vermonters want to get together and hold a rally mocking the "bring the troops home now" crowd, with a "bring the journalists home now" rally? That's the kind of cut and run I can get on board with.

On with the show...

Big hat tip goes out to AllahPundit who is getting bombarded with tips, and while I don't have nearly as many tipsters, keeping up with everything and posting a few things in my backlog is practially impossible. But this one is a must see.

If you're a subscriber to U.S. News & World Report (*MID-POST UPDATE* Time Magazine was fooled too<), then your magazine showed up in the mail a couple weeks ago with the cover you see at right. And if you've been following the Hajj scandal, and all the subsequent disection of the Hezbollywood media, you probably also saw the following photo taken by Adnan Hajj.

Maybe you didn't catch that image, but most of us in the blogosphere did as we dug through the Hajj collection, looking for more to crow about. Dan Riehl actually posted it when trying to determine if the man in the photo was the same man seen in other photos. He recalls the photo in his two posts (here and here) on the latest development (which I promise I'm getting to).

Now thanks to Allah, Michelle Malkin, Riehl and others, we learn that this photo is yet another case of fakery.

Obviously you see the burning pile in the distance in both photos, but can you tell what's burning? All captions we've seen say that the fire is wreckage from a downed Israeli jet, do we have any reason to doubt that? Allah posts a scan of the caption from Time magazine who also featured a photo of the same scene. It reads:

The wreckage of a downed Israeli jet that was targeting Hizballah trucks billows smoke behind a Hizballah gunman in Kfar Chima, near Beirut. Jet fuel set the surrounding area ablaze.

Really? Let's take a closer look:

Closer still:

Wait, that appears to be just a trash dump, full of burning tires. I'd like to know what Mr. Hezbo is aiming his gun at, but I'm certain he couldn't just be posing for this captivating photo, right? I mean, if there's one thing we've learned this week... it's to believe every photo and piece of news you see coming out of Lebanon. Well, that's the gist of what we've learned.. only the exact opposite. (Okay, not that funny of a joke unless you're hearing Norm MacDonald saying it in your head, like he did in Dirty Work after describing the bar fight).

AllahPundit has some questions about some other photos as well. And more here and here.

Rusty uses some one of these images, and another taken moments later as part of his making the case that Adnana Hajj may have multiple identities, one of which may or may not still also be employed by Reuters.

Zombie has a great round-up of all the types of deceit Reuters has been found to traffic in, this week in Lebanon.

*****UPDATE****
I thought I'd breeze through some AFP photos to see if they had anything interesting related to all the "Fautography" we've been exposing this week, and what did I find? Another photo of the burning trash dump, with yet another description. The photo is actually on the Yahoo/AFP wires in two locations (here and here) with two slightly different captions (though their description of the cause of the fire is the same, which is the important part anyway).

Black smoke engulfs the sky following an Israeli air raid on Beirut's Kafarchima neighborhood. Britain is preparing for the biggest evacuation carried out by its military since World War II, as Israel continued to pound Lebanon in deadly air raids.(AFP/Oussama Ayoub)

Black smoke engulfs the sky following an Israeli air raid on Beirut's Kafarchima neighborhood. The first of six Royal Navy ships is positioned off Lebanon to begin a potential mass evacuation of Britons from the "appalling" situation there, Tony Blair has said.(AFP/Oussama Ayoub)

I'm going to ignore the different posting times of the images, because I think one could easily argue any number of reasons that this occurred innocently, but for the record they are stamped Tue Jul 18, 5:09 AM ET and Tue Jul 18, 6:38 PM ET respectively. 13 hours is a big difference, but again, I'm not sweating that.

What I'm concerned about is the fact that AFP calls the fire a result of an Israeli airstrike. We just established that Reuters (Hajj in tow) called the fire a result of a downed Israeli jet, while they had a Hezbollah fighter posing with his gun aimed at the fire. Despite both of these descriptions, we can easily see that it's a trash dump on fire, particularly rubber tires, which accounts for the dark black smoke (Rumor has it Adnan Hajj was relieved it wasn't gray smoke, or he'd have had to photoshop the black smoke in).

So it would appear that both AFP and Reuters are lying about the fire, sense we see it's just a trash dump. Is it possible that a jet went down there? Yes. Is it possible Israel struck the location? Yes. While I personally don't think either of these is likely, if one were proven true, it still means that the other description is a lie and someone needs to publicly own up to it.

More:
Michelle Malkin, The Yelling Box, Lightshiner, Brutally Honest, Outside the Beltway, Mark Nicodemo, Alphabet City, ThoughtsOnline, Alarming News, The Hashmonean, JFGreco's, Texas Rainmaker, Sierra Faith, Medary